Nationalist Francophobia

With anti-European sentiment running high at the moment, it really should come as no surprise to find that social networking sites such as Facebook are vast repositories of such views.

(Or should that be suppositories?)

However, some comments really stand out, such as this one (on an English Nationalist page) which tackles the current hot topic of Sarkozy and Merkel trying to shore up the Euro:

  Sarkozy is keeping up the famous French tradition of collaborating with the Hun.

Looking at the writer’s profile, they appear to be well-educated but there’s so much wrong with what they say, that I have to say that whoever awarded them the degree they claim to possess needs fucking sacking.

In one short sentence, they manage to cram in so much xenophobic feeling that you can almost smell the bigotry.

A 10 minute car journey from where I live will take you to a disused quarry where 27 French resistance fighters were executed by a German firing squad. Yes, of course there were French collaborators, but there were also many, many brave men and women who tried to keep France free and make life difficult for the occupying Germans.

Then there were the majority of ordinary people who neither resisted or collaborated but who just tried to get on with life as best they could whilst surrounded by deprivation and the constant reminders of the horrors of war.

People like this Facebook poster seem to forget that one of the main reasons that the Germans never invaded Britain was a purely geographical one.

Britain is an island and this was what saved us from being overrun like France was.

However, if Hitler had been successful and invaded us, then I have no doubts whatsoever that along with British resistance fighters, there would have been British collaborators.

The Nazis did, in fact, occupy British soil during the Second World War – the Channel Islands.

And yes, there were collaborators there, too – British ones.

Indeed, Facebook (and the same source) offers yet more anti-French ‘goodies’ which have emerged since I broke off writing this entry.

Here are a few examples:

"France; a beautiful country inhabited by swine…."

"The biggest trouble with France is it is completely overrun with the French."

"Lol I love France, just can’t take the arrogance of its inhabitants!!"

"I’m pro English, not anti-French. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. hang on a minute – that’s the same thing, isn’t it? LOL"

"I have just started using the French version of Twitter.
"Its exactly the same except it retweets really quickly.:-)"

My…they’re a fucking riot, aren’t they?

And so self-congratulatory and amused by themselves.

Well, having lived here for nearly 2 years, I can quite honestly say that the French we’ve met have been nothing but friendly, kind, helpful and welcoming.

Still, that’s some English Nationalists for you…

Xenophobic, intellectually-stunted and petty-minded.

 

Or, to put it rather more succinctly, shit for fucking brains.

An English Democrat gets his wish

Well, he must have his own private fucking genii because the moronic EDP motherfucker who seemed to want to see a bit more ‘get up and go’ in evidence on the streets of the UK certainly got his wish today.

School pupils as young as 14 decided to take the day off school and protest against the hike in student tuition fees and the involvement of the Lib Dems in all of this.

Fortunately, most of the protests passed off peacefully, although as I’ve just seen on the local London BBC regional news program tonight, it got a bit fraught in the capital – particularly around Whitehall. Indeed, as I write this, I’ve just seen a report from a ‘kettled’ area where a bus shelter has been set on fire. Earlier, steel barriers were thrown at police lines and an isolated police vehicle was cut off by protesters and vandalised.

Even worse, I’ve just seen Lenny Henry – surely one of the most overrated UK comedians of all time – on the One Show cracking a joke that the protests at least meant that students had stopped eating Doritos, put their trousers on, turned off Trisha and gone out to do something.

So what about the 14 year old school kids kettled in Whitehall while you’re in a nice cosy studio, Lenny? Pleased to see them go out and do something instead of that boring old schoolwork – like bunking off school and getting kettled, perhaps?

Cunt.

And speaking of cunts…

Who knows, perhaps the EDP shithead who wanted to see a bit more UK street action has a son or daughter kettled at this very moment in Whitehall!

It’s possible, as I understand that the party has a bit of a presence in Kent, and in its towns such as Dartford, so it must be easy enough to nip up to the capital’s streets where ‘guts were being displayed’ today.

Although it’s easy enough to mobilise large numbers of people – mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook, etc – when the various groups of school pupils got to the protest, many of them interviewed seemed upset that what they had intended to be a 100% non-violent event had been hijacked by certain elements who were intent on violence.

And there’s the danger.

When you’re 14, 15, 16, you’re not always aware that you might be being manipulated and your enthusiasms subverted by people whose aims are rather different to yours. That’s not a criticism, it’s just part of being young, and manipulation is manipulation, whether it’s by anarchists or record company executives. To many people, the young are fair game.

They certainly were today.

I’m not totally without sympathy with the broad thrust of the protesters today. After all, I benefited from a cheap degree with no tuition fees, but then I’ve also seen a blind dogmatic rush towards degrees for everybody at any cost by the last three Labour governments. This created an unsustainable demand on public money for cheap university education which we now simply cannot afford. And that’s another inevitable and inherent problem with being 14 or 15; a failure to appreciate that money will only stretch so far (after all, you don’t have to earn the fucking stuff), such as when you ask your parents for a new pair of £100 trainers. 

So, Mr Englsih (sic) Democrat, I don’t know whether your child’s shivering its arse off inside a police kettle in Whitehall at this very moment, but someone’s child certainly is.

Quite a few of them in fact.

Maybe you should be more careful what you wish for…

Getting wood with Graham Norton

Hoorah!

The wood we ordered arrived yesterday afternoon – and not a day too soon.

We had enough wood left for one night’s fire and then it would have been the Calor gas heater which isn’t too effective – especially with some one degree nights forecast.

You buy wood here in cordes and steres. Apparently a stere is a cubic metre of wood, and there are three steres to the corde. We ordered two cordes which now looks like this:

Two hours earlier it was just a heap on the drive…

Firewood here is almost always oak or beech, although chestnut is also available. Personally, I couldn’t give a flying fuck if we got a lorry load of teak if it was cold and we needed a fire!

Whilst sitting waiting for the wood man I saw a trailer for the Graham Norton Show.

I have nothing whatsoever against anyone of any sexual orientation or gender bent – as long as nobody gets forced into anything they don’t want to do or to which they are mentally incapable of consenting – but Graham Norton really pisses me off. I know a few gay people very well and they don’t camp around or bitch like Norton, so why do some high profile gays seem unable to appear without exhibiting this stereotypical behaviour?

What Norton seems to be is a grotesque caricature – not a million miles away from the camp, bitchy, mincing homosexuals that Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick were portraying as Julian and Sandy in ‘Round the Horne’ in the 1960s.

The big difference is that Julian and Sandy were far more amusing and infinitely more subtle.

Does Norton piss gays off?

I’d like to know.

Missing musings with Merlot

Seeing as we’re not exactly rushed off our feet here, getting up is a leisurely and fairly late affair.

The alarm usually goes off at 9.30 during the week and the first job is to put the coffee machine on so that a 4-mug pot of Colombian can be consumed as soon as possible.

Then it’s usually coffee and cigarettes with BBC1 ‘Breakfast’ on, so we can get the headlines in the UK and in the region we left.

Yes, I know exactly what a puddle of utter arse gravy ‘Breakfast’ is, but this morning it surpassed itself.

Between about 9.40 and 10.10 (French time, so knock an hour off if you’re in the UK – and if you’re in the US do whatever the fuck you want as you normally do anyway) there were three what can only be called advertising slots for:

• A ‘Riverdance’ in Beijing DVD plugged by its principal lead dancer – whose name escapes me
• Some dodgy singer warbling on about Aretha Franklin in a song from her new album – whose name escapes me
• Some dodgy singer touring the UK singing Hollywood songs – whose name escapes me

Now, whilst I can see what the guests and the various organisations and people behind them get from these plugs on the show, what does the BBC get?

I assume these people get paid to appear, in which case it’s fucking doubles all round for them, isn’t it?

However, even if they do it for free then they at least get the plugs.

Do they pay the BBC for the publicity? I doubt it – unless it’s brown paper bag time involving BBC execs and artistes’ agents – but if they do pay a fee then that’s advertising revenue being generated and is really no different to advertising the VW Polo or Andrex toilet paper, in principle.

However, whether the BBC gets paid or not, it’s still advertising and if it’s for free, then why not fucking charge for it and defray some of the costs and reduce the licence?

If it isn’t for free then why not advertise cars, nappies, funeral plans or baked beans?

Whether it’s a new book, play, TV series, film, tour, album or show the BBC seems to bend over backwards to publicise it and that, as far as I’m concerned, is advertising.

Or am I missing something here?

Given that the majority of the budget of Universities and other higher education bodies consists of staffing costs, why not drastically reduce the length of vacations and thus make 3 year courses last only 2 years?

At a single stroke, tuition fees for a degree course would then be reduced by a third, making any future hikes in tuition fees unnecessary in the immediate future and more affordable in the long term.

Or am I missing something here?

Here’s something I didn’t miss.

Fancy a little jaunt over to France? There’s a music festival on in Le Mans next month and of particular interest is one of the acts towards the bottom of the bill:

(Written with the aid of a bottle of Merlot whilst waiting for some real bacon to grill…)

The success of failure…the failure of success

Language is an amazing thing…

…whether it’s your own with all the expressive power and beauty that you can summon up in order to communicate or a foreign language that you’re trying to come to grips with.

After 7 months here in France, it’s getting slowly but steadily easier to both understand spoken French and to speak it ourselves.

I find the whole French language ‘experience’ very rewarding and today was great, with an hour-long chat with our neighbour, totally in French, and then arranging a delivery of firewood with M. Thireau at Renaze when I also had to give him directions to our place, again all in French.

Obviously, I’m still exposed to English (we’re not so immersed in the culture that we’re conversing in French at home, and the Sky Box carries all the usual English-speaking channels) and the few ex-pats that we have dealings with – we didn’t move here to get involved in some sort of British enclave – give us a chance to chat in our Mother Tongue from time to time.

However, after intermittently watching British TV here for a few months, I feel forced to ask, what the FUCK has happened to the English language?

In particular, what the FUCK is it with all this ‘heart and soul’ and ‘with passion/passionate about’ shite?

It seems that almost everyone who does anything has done, is doing or will do whatever it is with all their ‘heart and soul’ or that they’re ‘passionate’ about it.

It doesn’t matter what it is, there’s always this self-promoting, self-justifying cack which really doesn’t mean anything after even superficial analysis.

I’ve even heard it justifying total failure where it’s used as some sort of excuse – ‘well, I was really passionate about it’ – as if simply wanting to do something was some sort of key to success. What about skill, talent, practice or self-discipline, for fuck’s sake? 

Everyone, from an X-Factor contestant to a Commonwealth Games competitor, puts their ‘heart and soul’ into their efforts and says so with monotonous regularity  – but how else should they approach their endeavours if they’re serious about gaining success?

But it’s not just that these once valid but sparingly-used expressions of supreme effort and mental dedication have lapsed into cliché – they’re now used to justify lacklustre and mediocre achievement and even abject failure.

Fuck me…I can just about tolerate these expressions from people who clearly make an effort – it’s just lazy speech – but when it’s some obviously talentless twat in a TV talent show then it’s a bit more than just linguistic sloppiness – it’s self-delusion, as they clearly mean it.

Personally, I find it somehow emblematic of a generation, sapped of ambition through a culture of tolerance towards the average and mediocre, which now believes that merely stating that an effort has been made is the same as actually making an effort.

Increasingly low expectations in society  have robbed people of the ability to self-criticise and self-evaluate, with the result that even complete failure can be judged as some sort of success as long as the ‘passion’ was there or that one’s ‘heart and soul’ were in it.

I can clearly remember being told by my parents and teachers that as long as I did my best then it was no shame if I failed, but it seems that today it’s sufficient just to state that you did your best, even though no real effort was made. Thus the individual is taught to deceive himself in a misguided attempt to insulate him from failure.

But it goes even deeper than this.

Decades of deception on the part of successive governments and education experts have created a myth – the myth that no matter what background and/or intellectual capacity an individual has, he or she can be equipped to transcend these specific and often fixed limits and become enabled to achieve success. In essence, it’s a very laudable aim – but impossible to attain unless you lower your sights and redefine success.

A prime example of this can be found in the well-documented practice by some primary schools a couple of decades ago of banishing the competitive element from events like sports day. All participants were considered achievers and given a certificate regardless of whether they’d come first or last.

No-one lost.

But no-one won.

Those who came first were deprived of any sense of achievement and those who came last were deceived into thinking that they’d achieved equal placing with the winners.

Given that these children then entered a competitive society upon leaving school, many of them were ill-equipped to deal with competitiveness in the wider arena of work and other social situations.

(Nowadays, of course, we’re doing the same thing but with university students and Media Studies degrees…)

With educationalists seemingly given carte blanche over the last 50 years or so and government attempts at social engineering (admitted by those responsible in the last three Labour governments of the last 13 years) seeking to introduce equality across the socio-economic strata defined by ethnicity, gender, religion, race, income, environment and education, the British public was sold a monstrous lie – the lie that everyone could be a winner. In purely Darwinian terms this is a patent impossibility and, within the complex social structures of human society, pure fantasy.

Yes, equality of opportunity is a worthy goal, but only within very broad limits. Taking a metaphor from the school sports day example above, you can produce equal placings in a 100 yard dash if you handicap the faster runners with a time or distance penalty, but would those results have any real meaning either to the runners themselves or the doting parents?

Indeed, you could just dispense with entering potential winners in the race and thus ensure that some of the potential losers won – and that’s just what happened when the concept of ‘positive discrimination’ began to manifest itself in job selection, and shortlists and quotas began to specify that only certain groups of people would be considered for certain posts. Thus, those with a proven track record of success or obvious potential were often denied access to certain positions. So, once again, success was left unrewarded and the mediocre – and occasionally the failures – elevated to jobs beyond their skill sets.

Even within government itself, failure appears to be rewarded, with serial incompetents such as David Blunkett and Lord Fondlebum being given new cabinet posts after serious lapses of judgement and after a suitable period of time. Lesser figures in national and local government, finance, the Civil Service and a wide variety of public services seem to be able to escape accountability with impunity and, even when they are unable to continue in their job, often benefit from substantial severance payments and generous pension deals.

Naturally, the media plays a part in this celebration of the mediocre…

On one TV channel you can watch a documentary about the British airmen who fought in the Battle of Britain who really did put their ‘heart and soul’ into what they did, and often lost their lives in the process. Although I don’t doubt that their mental state must have been in turmoil, to say the least, prior to scrambling, nevertheless they just went ahead and flew off to an uncertain fate and possible death.

However, on another channel you can watch the day to day work of a haulage company, Eddie Stobart. I’ve just seen an extract involving the trucking of a load of cream cakes to Tesco in Didcot with the driver nervously saying what a difficult load it was. Now, whilst I have the greatest respect for truckers – with the exception of those fuckers who overtake their colleagues on the motorway with only a 1 mph speed advantage – it’s not exactly a matter of national defence or a process which might well result in death.

So, we celebrate the mundane in the same terms as we celebrate the heroic with few of us aware of the absurdity of it all.

Meanwhile, the absurdity formed after years of social manipulation and the drive for equality at all costs sits like a tumour at the heart of our society – success is largely derided unless it’s approved by a celebrity TV jury and failure is accepted as an inevitable consequence of equality.

Indeed, at times, I’m hard-pressed to tell the difference between success and failure… 

Hornets and a Wasp

I’ve posted quite a lot about the number of strange (to us) creatures we’ve seen since we’ve been living in the Mayenne and it’s been a fantastic experience  observing the French flora and fauna but – as with most pleasures – there’s a downside…

According to one of our future neighbours, the west of France has a major wasp problem.

Although I can’t find anything to confirm this on the interwebs, anecdotal evidence here seems to confirm it, with another of our future neighbours regularly complaining about the effect they have on his bees. He has several hives and his honey production is suffering.

But it’s not only the wasps, it’s the hornets – les frelons. This is a new word in my French vocabulary and one I wish I didn’t know.

Whilst wasps don’t really bother me – live and let live, plus they kill garden pests – hornets are a different matter.

They seem bolder and more inquisitive than wasps and they also pack a very painful sting and although I’m quite a peaceful soul as regards pests (flies, mosquitoes and rats are fair game but I can tolerate most other creatures around me) hornets are rapidly becoming a nuisance and are now dealt with accordingly.

However, whilst a simple whack with a fly swat can at least stun a wasp long enough for you to really lamp the bugger with a handy shoe or other weighty object, should the need arise, it takes more than a swipe with the swat to bring down a hornet.

Jesus Christ, they’re tough bastards!

We recently bought a spray which seemed to be the most lethal on the market and specifically for guepes (wasps) and frelons.

Wasps don’t stand a fucking chance! It kills them immediately – and I’ve even used it on a nest which is now wasp Chernobyl. Hornets are a different matter though.

I trapped a hornet in between a window and a shutter at about 11 o’clock last night, gave the gap a good spray very quickly and left the pesticide to do its stuff.

When I opened the shutter to get the dead hornet out, sure enough, there it was on the floor…but it wasn’t dead…

It lay there, visibly twitching – untill I twatted the bugger with one of my steel toecapped work boots. It was one dead motherfucker then.

Although I can’t find anything recent about a plague of hornets in France, I did find this from 2007:

The French honey industry is under threat from hordes of bee-massacring oriental hornets, the Daily Telegraph reports.

The forests of Aquitaine, in south-west France, now play host to swarms of the the Asian Hornet, Vespa velutina, which is believed to have arrived there “from the Far East in a consignment of Chinese pottery in late 2004”.

Entomogist Jean Haxaire, who first eyeballed the invaders, said: “Their spread across French territory has been like lightning.”

Haxaire said he’s now counted 85 “football-shaped” nests across the 40 miles which separate the towns of Marmande and Podensac “in the Lot et Garonne department where the hornets were first spotted”.

The Asian Hornet can cause some serious damage to a human, “inflicting a bite which has been compared to a hot nail entering the body”. But that’s not the principal threat they pose. They can decimate a nest of 30,000 bees “in a couple of hours” in search of larvae on which to feed their young. This, unsurprisingly, gives local beekeepers serious cause for alarm.

Co-incidentally, another bunch of fucking pests, the EDP, seem to have lost a Wasp they’d rather have liked to have kept. Paul Sackey now plays for Toulon in France. This may well be old news, but it’s new to me. Sackey is one – perhaps the only one – of the party’s celebrity endorsers. I wonder how the party feels about him playing in France? Actually, scrap that – I really don’t give a flying fuck.

The French paper chase – update – and Tiny Tom Cruise

I am now the proud owner of a…wait for it…

Certificat d’Importation d’un vehicule terrestre a moteur en provenance  de la commaunite Europeenne par une personne non identifiee a la TVA

Armed with this document and a few others I can now go to the prefecture at Laval of the departement in which we live – Mayenne – and get the car re-registered.

After two trips to Chateau Gontier in three days I’ll leave the final stage for next week.

Godammit – it is almost the weekend…

OK…the One Show…I had the misfortune to catch a few minutes of this evening’s edition.

There was a segment about how some people have been conned out of thousands of pounds by romance scammers via internet dating agencies. Personally, I wouldn’t give money to anyone I hadn’t at least met face to face, but some people obviously have more money than sense.

Then the One Show cuts to a red carpet interview with Tom Cruise – the diminuitive Scientologist film star – and the male One Show host’s (his bastarding name escapes me) first question to the Hollywood dwarf?

What do you think of online dating?

Now, whilst I realise that the hosts of the One Show might not be investigative journalists with searching and incisive questions springing naturally to their lips, and that the One Show itself isn’t exactly known for probing inquiries into matters of pressing public concern, what a stupid fucking cunting question.

Thank fuck I don’t have to pay a TV licence anymore, because if I did I’d be contacting the BBC as to why they were wasting the licence fee revenue employing cunts like the One Show twat and paying him good money (and lots of it) to ask stupid fucking questions.

It’s just one small step from ‘What’s your favourite colour, Tommo?’ – in fact, that might even be a more relevant question under the circumstances, as it’s probably something upon which Cruise has an opinion, but his experience of online dating must be rather limited, to say the least. Or so I would imagine.

And whilst I’m in rant mode:

What the fucking fuck are the Hairy Fucking Bikers all about?

Why are they being paid good money to fart around the country acting like the arsing Chuckle Brothers with a motherfucking cook book? All I can see are two mouthy cunts who are about as funny as a sack of drowned puppies and two more ‘TV chefs’ who ought to thank their lucky stars that they’ve got their talentless paws on the seemingly limitless supply of licence fee dosh provided by the gullible British public and chucked about like confetti by the BBC.

What’s more, BBC execs are getting even more money than these motherfuckers are getting paid for putting them on the screen in the first place.

It’s high time the BBC gravy train was derailed – I favour strapping the entire fucking cast of ‘My Family’ to the points, but that’s probably just me…

The French paper chase

Fuck, fuck and…er…fuck again…

French bureaucracy has just bitten me in the arse.

I’m trying to re-register my car so I can get the ‘carte grise’ and have French plates – no road tax then! – which is a legal requirement eventually if I’m staying here.

I’ve done everything right so far, and at no small expense:

• Headlights changed for driving on the wrong side of the road – 414 Euros
• Controle Technique (French MOT valid for 2 years) – 62 Euros
• Certificate of Conformity from Ford – £82.25

So, off I go to the Hotel des Impots (local tax office) at Chateau Gontier to get the last piece of paperwork – a declaration that my car isn’t new and that I don’t owe any money on it – before taking the whole wodge of documents to Laval to get re-registered, only to find that they need proof of my address.

This will have to be done through my local mayor here, who should be able to provide me with an attestation of my address.

The fact that I have French car insurance, French top-up health insurance, a French social security number and a French bank account – all of which are dependent on me having provided a valid and verifiable French address on four separate occasions already – didn’t seem to cut any ice with the lady at the tax office, even when I showed her the documents.

So, I’m back home after a 70km round trip that achieved rather less than fuck all.

Still, few things have annoyed me about living in France so far so I’m just going to go with the flow, roll with the punches, suck it up, blah, blah, blah…

All the same…fuckity fuck, fuck, fuck…

Next, please!

When we were back in the UK was week, one of the questions we were most frequently asked was how were we coping with the French language.

Our standard reply was that in this part of France, at least, very few people either didn’t speak English or felt inclined not to, so we had to do our best to communicate totally in French. This was getting easier as we were amassing a useful vocabulary and were beginning to understand the spoken language better.

Indeed, why should the French speak English? It’s their country, after all, and it’s up to us to adapt and not them. So, we shall struggle on – no doubt making many mistakes, faux-pas and gaffes but learning all the time and possibly amusing a few of the natives into the bargain.

I’m not sufficiently fluent yet – and I strongly doubt I ever will be – to tell if someone is using French correctly or to be aware of change in general use of the language, but after nearly 60 years of speaking English I think I’m better qualified to notice these things in my own language.

So, step forward the BBC.

Long cited as one of the bastions of the Queen’s English, the Corporation seems to have embarked on a mini-Crusade to change not just a very basic and common word, but also a fundamental concept that guides each and every one of us through life.

The word is ‘next’ and the concept is sequence.

This culminated last night in a rant at the television between the penultimate and the ultimate episodes of the latest series of ‘Doctor Who,.

Having just sat through episode 12, the overpaid continuity announcer then informed me that “next on BBC3’ was a film about dragons called ‘Reign of Fire’, but first the last episode of ‘Doctor Who’.

What the fucking fuck?

That’s like me saying that after today (Saturday) the next day coming up is Monday, but first we’ve got Sunday coming up.

Sitting here, in the kitchen, I can see a row of mugs on a shelf. looking from the left I can first see a stripy mug and then a blue one and lastly a yellow one. That’s a basic sequence and describes exactly what I can see. I haven’t got a stripy mug and next a yellow one but, oh look, there’s a fucking blue mug before the yellow one.

The sequence is stripy, blue, yellow.

End of.

Just as last night’s schedule was ‘Doctor Who Episode 12’, ‘Doctor Who Episode 13’, ‘Reign of Fire’.

What the blistering cunting fuck was the problem with saying something like, “Next on BBC 3 is the last episode of ‘Doctor Who’ and after that a film about dragons called ‘Reign of Fire’”? It’s informative, correct and logical.

Similarly, I’m getting mightily pissed off with the word ‘best’ used to mean ‘favourite’. Although I don’t listen to BBC Radio 5 anymore, early on a Monday morning during his book phone-in when Dotun Adebayo used to ask listeners to ring in and tell him what ‘my best book’ was, it used to drive me fucking mental.

Dotun, you drivelling shithead, it’s ‘favourite book’. ‘Best’ implies that it’s either the smartest one on the shelf or it’s the writer’s master work.

I realise that language evolves, but this doesn’t have to mean that it loses precision or meaning. As our chief means of communication, language is precious, particularly the spoken word, which is how we all interact on a daily basis. Fuck with this and you could cause all sorts of problems. I mean, you can argue all fucking night about what the terms ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ mean, but surely ‘next’ or ‘best’ are so clear cut that we can all use them without the need to puzzle over them first.

Anyway, fuck the BBC and their publicly-funded shit, I’m going to post this to my blog.

Next I’m going to go to bed.

But first I’m going to sit outside with coffee and a smoke, have lunch, play guitar, sink a few beers, have dinner, watch a DVD and read for a while before turning out the light… 

The glorious inanity of pop music

One of my favourite Noel Coward quotes – and I’ve used it in this blog before – is this:

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is

And he’s not fucking wrong.

Pop music, by its very nature, was never intended to be of lasting worth – although much of it is – but sometimes the most inane music can capture public imagination in an enduring way.

Foe some bizarre reason, I’ve had this first piece in my head a lot lately and although it’s totally dumb, it’s great fun. Here’s Electric Six with ‘Gay Bar’. Turn your intellect off and just enjoy some great but edifyingly stoopid pop music:

The companion piece is much older. It’s Scotland’s finest: the Rezillos. The girl singer’s stage name always makes me laugh. Fay Fife…”I’m Fay Fife’…”I’m from Fife’…imagine this said in a Scottish accent…

The Rezillos were great fun and covered many songs that were already totally dumb like ‘Glad All Over’ and ‘I Like It’. However, they also wrote some great original material and here they are with ‘(My baby does) Good Sculptures’. In fact, the overall vibe – guitar-based, slightly crazed over the top enthusiasm – isn’t a million miles away from ‘Gay Bar’, which shows that there’s always room in our lives for cheap music – and hoo-fucking-ray for that I say!